We just got back from a short trip to Southern Ontario, and let me tell you, you haven’t known excitement until you’ve taken a 7-hour car ride with a newly-toilet-trained toddler. Since The Captain is new to the whole potty thing, he isn’t too familiar with the intricacies of Effective Rest Stop Management. Sometimes he’d be unable to pee the entire hour we were stopped at the KFC, only to have a pee emergency 10 minutes down the road.

Luckily Sir Monkeypants is a fabulous car packer and he arranged for the toddler potty to be in the very back of our Forester, ready to use. So when we heard the Emergency Warning Signal — “Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!” coming from the backseat — we’d pull off the highway, leap out of the car, pull Captain Jelly Belly out of his seat, throw open the Forester hatch, pull down the pants, and pop CJB onto the potty in the trunk. At first we made him wait a minute or two, until we found an exit ramp to pull onto, but we soon learned that he wasn’t scared of the passing traffic at all — in fact, it was a major appeal of the process. Twice on the way down we had to stop, and it was raining and freakin’ cold, so Sir Monkeypants and I huddled in jackets under the hatch as we tried to protect CJB from the rain with a blanket, and implored him to stop pointing out how cool the passing trucks were and just pee already. Twice on the way home we had to stop, and while I was dumping out pee on the side of the road, Sir Monkeypants was trying to convince CJB that we — SERIOUSLY — had to get back into the car RIGHT NOW, and no, he could not ride backwards in the trunk of the car while sitting on the potty the whole way home, because watching trucks is cool but there are no safety restraints in the cargo area.

Once we were into the last hour of the trip we started to suspect that CJB was giving the Emergency Warning Signal just because he was bored and wanted to watch some trucks for a while — the Boy Who Cried Pee, if you will. So we made him push through until we got home. He’s back to using the potty at home but really, it just isn’t as exciting when there aren’t trucks whizzing by at 120 clicks. I suppose next he’ll be asking me to make some “vroom, vroom, whoosh!” noises whenever it’s pee pee time.